Lily King - Father of the Rain

“I didn’t think you’d come,” I said.

He pulled out four invitations from his jacket pocket. “How could I not?”

Despite what I’d said, Julie had sent one anyway. And Michael had sent one before that. And so, it turned out, had Alex. All these people, looking out for me.

“I knew this would happen,” he said in my ear. I wanted his mouth to stay there, right there. There wasn’t anything else left in the world to want but this.

“What?”

He slipped his hand between us to rub his chest. “All these feelings .”

“You don’t sound so pleased.”

“You know I like a little more control over myself than this.”

I did know that. There were so many things I suddenly knew.

We got married in that spot in Julie and Michael’s garden a few years later. Jonathan’s mother and brothers, Garvey and Paul, were our only other guests. I never knew before that moment that you can feel love, like a slight wind, when it’s strong enough. You can do this, they all seemed to be saying. This is where you can put your love safely.

After I hung up with Hatch, I stood in the door of Jonathan’s study.

“My father is in the ICU.”

“What happened?”

“Stroke.”

He came and put his arms around me.

“They think he’s going to die.” I laid my cheek on his collarbone. I didn’t feel sad because my father was in the hospital. I felt sad for his entire life.

“What are you thinking?” he asked, after a while.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t go alone. I’d need you there.” This is what had happened to me in eleven years. I’d learned to need him, to lean on him, which is separate from love.

I could feel him taking that in. “Then I think we should go. All of us,” he said. “We’ll find a hotel with a pool. The kids will love it.”

“Really?” We were saving for a trip to visit his father’s relatives in Trinidad.

“We have to allow for emergencies.”

“I don’t know, Jon. I don’t know if I can do it.”

“He’s unconscious, right? You’ll be able to say whatever you need to say to him without rebuttal.”

“I’m not sure I have anything to say.”

“Then you can say goodbye. You didn’t get that chance with your mom.”

And he didn’t get it with his dad. “But it’s so complicated.”

“Of course it is.”

“I don’t think I’d regret not going.” I’d have to take personal days at work; the kids would miss school.

“But there’s a chance you will be glad you went, an outcome that has a far greater value than nonregret.”

“Said the philosopher.”

“I knew that PhD would come in handy someday.”

Neither of us ever became professors. I teach middle school social studies — ancient civilizations and world history. I like those grades, sixth through ninth, my students still open, willing to reveal their curiosity and imagination and humor to me, willing to allow me mine. Jonathan works part-time for his brother building houses, and writes fiction. He and Dan were nominated for, and lost, the same prize last year, but it’s his first novel that gets the most attention. I see paperback copies of it around school in the fall because a colleague of mine teaches it in the high school. It’s based on the year after he left the terrace on Myrtle Street and roamed the country in his truck, working when he needed cash, moving on when he’d made enough, his careful plans destroyed. He was as itinerant and broke as his father when he first came here from Trinidad, and his life was threatened more than once. It’s a hard book for me to read.

We decided to drive up to Massachusetts the next morning.

Barbara and I eat lunch in the cafeteria. She thanks me for coming. Her crumpled face crumples even more. “I know it means so much to him, Daley.”

“I’m not sure he has any idea who I am, but I’m glad I’m here.”

“He knows. He’s missed you.”

I don’t know that I believe her, but I’ve missed him too. We missed each other. We aimed and we missed.

In the afternoon my father dozes, loud and rattling. They are short naps, sometimes only a few minutes long. And then his eyes open. They move to the TV first, then to me and Barbara, then to the nurses’ station where all the action is, doctors picking up and dropping off paperwork, people tapping things into computers.

“Okay, then, you do that,” his favorite nurse says into the phone. My father imitates her without opening his mouth. He catches her inflection perfectly. He is like a parrot with its beak shut. Barbara takes out her needlepoint and urges me to read my book or get some magazines from the waiting area, but I don’t want distraction.

Visitors pass by on their way to see patients farther in, and again on their way out. They appear briefly, cross our six-foot stage from curtain to curtain, and are gone. A tall young woman in a cape and long black hair passes by. She looks a bit like Catherine did, years ago. My father’s head snaps toward me, eyes wide. I laugh. He tries to speak but it’s just a long croak, a hopeful croak, almost like he wants to say hello to her.

“I don’t think that was her. But it looked like her, didn’t it?”

He nods, still looking at the place she disappeared from.

“Who looked like who?” Barbara asks.

I decide not to answer.

He dozes off. Fifteen minutes later he wakes up and says, very clearly, that Chad Utley came to visit that morning.

“Oh, Gardiner, no, he didn’t,” Barbara says. “Chad Utley is dead.”

My father looks at me. “Deh?”

I shrug. I’m sorry to hear this. Mile High Mr. Utley. He was always kind to me. But I don’t think my father needs to be reminded of his death right now.

“We went to the funeral,” she says.

My father takes the news hard. He stares at his hands. They’re folded on his belly. Barbara and I are at cross-purposes. She needs him to meet her in the present, and I am happy for him to remain deep in the past.

His mouth slackens and he falls asleep again.

“You know, Daley,” Barbara says quietly, “your father lost a lot of friends by marrying me. They all sided with Ben against us. It was very unpleasant. We were alone. Totally alone. Hatch was about the only person who would visit. And Virginia Utley was the worst of them all. But when Chad died, your father was the first one over to her house that afternoon. And she has never stopped thanking him for it. I know you two have had your difficulties, but I don’t think you have any idea what a good man he is.”

I can see her assembling another vignette, so I ask about her needlepoint.

“It’s the ship your father and I took to France when we were first married. It was honestly the most romantic trip. We danced every night. They had a wonderful band.”

“What kind of music did they play?” I have to speak loudly. My father is making a racket in his sleep.

“Oh, all stuff before your time. Our song was ‘It’s Like Reaching for the Moon.’ They played it every night, the last song. Out on the deck. Beneath all the stars.”

“I don’t know it.”

“You don’t? It’s lovely.”

“How does it go?”

You never know, from someone’s speaking voice, if they will be able to sing or not. Barbara has never had a mellifluous way of talking, but she sings beautifully, surprisingly low and rich.

It’s like reaching for the moon,

It’s like reaching for the sun,

It’s like reaching for the stars—

Reaching for you .

At first she sings down to her needlepoint, but soon she lifts her face to me. I do not hide my pleasure from her. Then she looks at my father and she stops short. “Oh, sweetie, oh, sweetie, don’t do that.” She leaps up and goes to the other side of the bed to wipe the tears from my father’s face with her hand, but her own fall on them both. She holds my father’s hands. “That was our song, wasn’t it?”